PowerMac G5 and LACP

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I’ve been playing around recently with backups, trying to get them going again for my data. I’m moving the backups to my oldest Mac, a G5 Metal Tower. I purchased a gig ethernet card for it and since it comes with built-in gig I wanted to setup LACP with it.

LACP will bond the two ethernet cards into one link on my switch. I set the switch up and had LACP working. I could verify it was working since I also set it for my NAS which was happily used the LCAP ports.

The key to setting up LCAP on Leopard is the the little ‘tool’ widget/control in the Network Preference Pane:

Screen shot 2011-02-09 at 12.28.47 AM.png

Selecting Manage Virtual Interfaces leads you to this sub-panel:

Screen shot 2011-02-09 at 12.28.59 AM.png

Where you can create a new bonded ‘virtual’ interface.

You can then add in your two ethernet interfaces to this, and the should come up and negotiate with teh LCAP enabled ports on your switch.

I’m only running Leopard on my G5, but it had some serious errors with both interfaces plugged into the switch. It came up but had no BW – it could barely load a web page. Unplugging one of the physical links resolved the issue, but defeats the purpose of the LCAP. I’m doing more investigation as to why this won’t work properly.

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